


Vibe Checks

by ArtemisTheHuntress



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: A peek into Eiffel's brain while he's recuperating on the Urania, Aromantic Character, CW for some (hypothetical) gore imagery in the first paragraph, Canon Compliant, Eiffel has impeccable vibe readings of people, Gen, It's a mess in there, Post-"Mayday", Stream of Consciousness, lots of headcanons, this also extends to perfect gaydar, this has been shown time and time again, two of them in fact
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-18
Updated: 2020-03-18
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:29:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23193223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArtemisTheHuntress/pseuds/ArtemisTheHuntress
Summary: Eiffel, delirious and dying, gets rescued by theUraniaand its crew.Trying to put together what exactly is happening and who these people are, his first impressions of them are... that something, somehow, is off.  But his first impressions are rarely wrong.  He may not be sure what's going on, but the two things he does know are 1) these guys wig him out, and 2) none of them are straight.
Comments: 14
Kudos: 72





	Vibe Checks

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this in a frenzy of energy in the span of about 2.5 hours between midnight and 3 am when I was too stressed, tense, and wired to sleep. Some later editing for readability, clarity, wording, and flow later, I'm like, you know what, the more fanfiction out there for people to read right now, the better, so I'm putting it out there to the world.
> 
> Self-indulgent? Full of headcanons and projection? Yeah, kinda.
> 
> A lot of these hc's grew out of various discord discussions with [G_J_Smith](https://archiveofourown.org/users/G_J_Smith/pseuds/G_J_Smith), [deliverusfromsburb](https://archiveofourown.org/users/deliverusfromsburb/pseuds/deliverusfromsburb), and [JudgementKinsey](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SkazuhiraMiller/pseuds/JudgementKinsey), thank you all.

He’s only partially conscious and only mostly lucid when the people open up the hatch. He’s curled up in the pilot’s chair because it’s the position that hurts least, but everything hurts, in a dull, distant, achy way. His head feels cloudy and starts to pound if he tries to focus too hard. His vision is swimming and he’s not fully sure he sees people coming towards him, if there’s one or two or three. He’s so nauseous that in the back of his mind there keeps running a looping image, a fantasy of slicing his stomach open and scooping his queasy guts out with an ice cream scoop. It’s strangely comforting, except when his mind accidentally pictures one of those serrated scoopers instead of the smooth one with the wooden handle he had in the drawer next to the stove in the kitchen when he was a kid before his parents divorced. He’s not sure why it’s so vivid and image, but he focuses on that one, because it’s smooth, and wouldn’t tear his insides to ribbons if he tried to scoop them out and dump them on a piece of old newspaper like a Halloween pumpkin, inert outside his body, just to make it stop _hurting_.

“Damn,” a male voice says. “He’s a mess, huh.”

“He looks _awful,”_ a female voice agrees. “And smells awful.” She sounds more curious than disgusted.

“Be nice,” another male voice says as hands lift Doug off the chair. Or drag him down, maybe. It’s all the same in zero-g. The enemy’s gate is down. Is the friendly gate up? Are these people bringing him up or down? It’s too philosophical. His head hurts and the hands moving him aren’t making too much of an effort to be gentle. “He just survived a hell of a time that by rights he shouldn’t have. An interesting man. I’ll be _very_ curious to talk to him, so be _nice_ , Mr. Jacobi.”

“Whaaaaaat, you know me, Colonel,” the first voice says. “When have I _ever_ been anything but perfectly _nice?”_ There’s a snicker, it sounds like it's from the woman, but he’s not sure because at the same time Doug is hoisted over a shoulder and passes out.

* * *

Doug Eiffel wakes up for real, and he’s strapped to a bed. He feels vaguely like this maybe should distress him, but it mostly just feels like being safe in bed back on the _Hephaestus,_ so it doesn’t. His stomach still churns and his head still hurts, and his skin feels simultaneously wrinkled like he’s been in the ocean too long and fragile like it all might split apart and spill blood out any second. His scalp is cold and itchy but he can’t move to scratch it. He tries.

“Hey,” says a man’s voice, “hold still or you’re going to get this fluid all over the cabin, and that’ll be a bitch and a half to clean up.” Doug’s eyesight is still not great but is starting to focus; there’s a man standing over him, holding a—long tubey thing? It’s medical and goes in your arm but he’s blanking on the word.

It’s the first man from whenever that was, getting found, the one who doesn’t talk as much as the other one, and—wait. He’s not on the USS _Horrible Unending Nightmare_ anymore, he’s on a _bed,_ and the lights are too bright, and there’s another real person here, and the other person here jabs something into his arm.

An IV. Right. That’s what it’s called. His nerves are so dulled he barely feels it. Instead he tries to focus his eyes, see what’s going on, but he can only look up (or down? whatever) at the man now looking bored at the IV line, making sure it’s working but apparently not very emotionally invested if it isn’t. He has a ponytail that floats and spreads behind his head. There’s a streak of color that shouldn’t be there, and Eiffel fixates on that while trying to figure out where he is, what just happened, and what’s going on.

His stomach doesn’t feel good. He was rescued, he thinks, but this doesn’t feel like a rescue. It doesn’t feel good for more than just physical reasons, but his physical senses aren’t great either. Eyes. Head. A connection, a feeling he’s trying to place. His brain is not cooperating, scattering for broken pieces and trying to jam them together into how he knows it’s supposed to work, make sense of things. Turquoise. That’s the streak of color in this man’s dark hair, the color that doesn’t make sense. 

“You’re gay?” Eiffel says, and his voice comes out a warbling creak. He’s not sure he meant to say that but he’s scrambling for connections and it’s true.

The man raises his eyebrows—eyebrow? He seems to only have the one, the other burned off—and says, languidly, “And _you’re_ the human equivalent of a half-melted popsicle someone dropped in the dirt and then stepped on, so I’d be polite about it, at least while you don’t have the ability to stop us from chucking you right back out where we found you if you make yourself a pest.”

“Uh.” Eiffel didn’t parse all of that. “Yes?”

“Mr. Jacobi, are you bothering our delicate patient?” the other male voice—right, there had been other people, hadn’t there?—drifts in from another room.

“No, sir,” Mr. Jacobi says, with far more snark than respect on the word _sir._ “He’s the one who decided to open with ‘You’re gay.’”

“You _are_ ,” the sir’s voice says, and Mr. Jacobi rolls his eyes. “Get that IV in so he doesn’t die, will you?”

“I don’t know why you’re complaining, Daniel,” the woman’s voice now, moving in with—oh. There she is. She has blue hair. No, it’s turquoise. “He seems like an unmitigated disaster and total mess. Just look at him. He looks like a skinny manatee. Exactly your type!”

“Shut _up,_ Alana,” Daniel Jacobi grumbles, and he sounds frustrated but not mad. Fond, underneath the grumbling. Eiffel is getting _some_ sort of vibes but he’s too tired to sort through all the signals he’s getting from everyone, and so passes out again.

* * *

He’s in and out of consciousness for who knows how long, so it takes him a while to realize he can stay awake for longer, think a little more clearly, see a little better. He’s still strapped to the bed. It’s starting to feel restrictive and uncomfortable rather than safe. He doesn’t know why it felt safe, really. It’s not like the _Hephaestus_ was ever safe.

The _Hephaestus_. The Commander and Hera and Captain Lovelace are still there. And Hilbert. But he’s a little less concerned about Hilbert. That’s probably bad to think and he feels bad for thinking it because he doesn’t want Hilbert to die or anything but also it’s true. Are they dying? He hopes not. He hopes the star going crazy didn’t do any damage. It sure _felt_ like it was doing damage. And the bomb—but the bomb was far out enough that it only affected the shuttle, right? He hopes. He thinks. He isn’t fully sure.

“Oh, your friends were alive last we heard from them,” the Colonel says cheerfully, and Eiffel realizes he must have been saying some of that out loud. “The whole group of you seems very impressive. Proving to be much hardier than the last ones. You’re fighters. I can respect that.”

“You’re a _cockroach,_ ” Jacobi says. “Take that as a compliment, or not, but I saw the remains of that bomb on the death trap you flew in on. None of that was in any way stable or controlled. It’s ridiculous that you aren’t dead.”

“I thought we weren’t supposed to bother the patient,” Alana says.

“He’s already awake, Dr. Maxwell,” the Colonel says. “Stimulation is probably good for the recovering cryogenic-frozen brain. In fact, reminds me of a time when I was on a short hop to the moon, when—” And there are two immediate, pained groans.

* * *

Between ins and outs of consciousness and lucidity while he comes back to the world of the coherent and living in snips and snapshots, Eiffel puts together an idea of where he is, and who he’s with now.

Jacobi and Maxwell are siblings. That doesn’t make sense because they look nothing alike and they have different last names, but they act like they are, they put off such strong _sibling_ vibes, and Eiffel spends a solid who-knows-how-long trying to parse through the fact that he has this rock-solid idea that they _do_ look alike, actually. Which doesn’t make sense, but the first time he saw them, he thought, _they look alike_ , and he’s trying to figure out why.

He’s still strapped down and still got an IV in his arm and more things poking various parts of his body that don’t easily let him move when it registers, like something coming into focus. Maxwell’s hair is a bizarre mix of red and blue—no, _turquoise_ , red roots and turquoise the rest of it piled and clipped back on her head. Same turquoise streak in Jacobi’s hair. Twinsies.

Eiffel still doesn’t have a name for the Long-Winded In-Charge Man besides the Colonel, but he’s in charge and likes to hear himself speak. He’s kind of annoying and weirdly intimidating for reasons Eiffel can’t place, but the creeping sense of discomfort whenever the Colonel talks so confidently is inescapable. And he’s definitely bisexual and actually kinda hot. It’s a weird mix of signals not helped by the fact that Eiffel still can’t move much and is seeing everyone in snippets and at not-great angles.

He sees Maxwell least, because she seems the busiest doing actual things, and he doesn’t know what things, and for some reason this unnerves him too. Maybe everything’s unnerving, because he’s strapped to a table. He wants to get _off_ the table but also feels like if he moves he will probably throw up so maybe they are still keeping him here on purpose. He has no idea how long it’s been since they found him. Drifting in and out of consciousness plays havoc with any sense of time.

Maxwell is hard to ping a reading on, for anything. She doesn’t seem threatening, until she says something weird that doesn’t _quite_ make sense, which feels like a threat unless it’s meant to be just benignly chaotic, chasing something thrilling and offbeat for her own reasons, which also feels possible, but never safe. She says computers are better than humans, which she seems to believe, but she clearly loves Jacobi, and Jacobi loves her, which, again, makes them seem safe until suddenly it doesn’t. Her favorite pastimes seem to be annoying him and trying to run _Doom_ on increasingly improbable things. And it’s not even that she’s also gay, exactly, though it almost feels that way sometimes but not quite, it’s more like—she reads as not into anyone, in general, not interested. Not anyone human anyway. (Maybe computers… computers are better than humans. Eiffel doesn’t think so, though.) Just, casually not wired for that and doesn’t care. Got other things she cares about.

It’s distressing, because what he does know (not much, because they won’t _tell_ him anything), but what he does know is that none of them are straight and all of them scare him and he doesn’t think he trusts them, which is a _weird_ batch of messages to get in his only-mostly-conscious chakras-open-to-the-soul-vibes mind.

For a minute after _that_ revelation clicks Eiffel is terrified he’s homophobic, because oh _no_. Then he remembers that oh right, he’s bisexual. (And aromantic??? It kinda made sense but he never did read that wikipedia article Hera forwarded to him when the topic came up, and hasn’t really thought much about it because introspection is on his Top Ten Least Favorite Things That Always Make Him Feel Like Shit and anyway the attempt “I can’t update the star charts today, Commander, I’m aromantic” failed to fly so there hasn’t been much call to pursue the thought more deeply.) Wait, aromantic, maybe that’s the word he’s looking for re: Maxwell. Oh no. But, hey, the Commander is _also_ bisexual and she’s incredible and impressive and kind of scary but only because she’s so good at everything, also sometimes she’s just scary, but in a good way, she’s amazing, and Lovelace is pretty obviously the most incredible lesbian he’s ever met, those words taken both separately and together—so he’s _pretty_ sure it’s not that, he just suspects that these guys on this ship do in fact have bad vibes. Which is a pretty ungrateful thing to think about the people who saved him from tumbling through endless space forever and dying. But. They do.

He can _hear_ a brain ghost of Minkowski, disapproving and impatient, telling him that vibes aren’t real, we call pre-judging people based on nothing _prejudice_ for a reason, we don’t tolerate that here, you _know_ that, Eiffel, and then a brain ghost of Hilbert saying something about thin slicing, and he knows he’s losing it as he falls asleep again.

* * *

The next time he wakes up, he feels… less awful than he has for a long time. He’s even allowed to get up. The Colonel—Kepler, Colonel Warren Kepler, and Eiffel gets an in-depth explanation of how important he is at Goddard, so Eiffel is aware of how special what’s going on is, even if he won’t actually say _what’s_ going on—is even willing to offer him a glass of water and sit down and finally actually _talk_ to him about what happened, and what’s going to happen.

“We’re going back to the _Hephaestus,”_ Colonel Kepler says, like he’s indulging Eiffel by finally actually explaining anything. “You’re doing something important here, Officer Eiffel. We have to see it through. You should be proud. You’re on the cusp of something great. It’s time for us to step in, set everything right, relieve you all of what must be a very significant stressor in your lives, and make sure everything’s smooth from now on.”

It sounds good. Eiffel nods. He’s torn between wanting to ask if Hera and the Commander and Lovelace are safe, because the longer he’s been capable of lucid thought the more he’s been worried about them, and asking if there’s anything to eat here on the—what was it? right, the _Urania_ —because oh wow he’s hungry. How long has it been since he ate anything?

That seems like a safe question. He’s… a little bit afraid to ask the other one. More than a little. “How… long has it been?” Eiffel asks. His voice is rusty.

“Since we picked you up?” Kepler says. “Four days and change. You’ve stabilized incredibly well, and _quickly,_ I’m impressed! Your hair might even grow back! You’re a survivor, Eiffel. You’d make a great member of the team once you start to think a little bit faster.”

Jacobi snorts.

“Oh,” Eiffel says faintly. He’s not sure if he was expecting longer or shorter than that. It feels like both.

“I’m sure you must have a lot of questions right now,” Kepler says. Eiffel expects a line about _we’ll answer anything you want to know_ to follow. It doesn’t.

Eiffel hopes it’s implied, because, well, he does. _Do you know if Hera is all right? Is Commander Minkowski? Is Captain Lovelace? Is Hilbert?_

His throat sticks when he tries to ask those questions. Maybe that makes him a coward. (Minkowski would ask, immediately. Lovelace would demand to know.) Instead, he manages the less important, less pressing, more pointless, but he _has_ been wondering and hasn’t been able to get off his mind, “Does Goddard hire _any_ straight people?”

Kepler, for the first time, seems slightly taken aback. Then he laughs, back to that easy in-command superiority. “Nope! There’s an interesting story there, you know—I got sent on a mission to scout out a potential recruit, I think Rachel Young was trying to set me up for failure, she’s like that, but wouldn’t you know—”

Maxwell buries her head in her hands. Jacobi glares daggers at Eiffel. Oops.


End file.
